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Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Short Takes

The financial meltdown of 2008 has
been attributed to a pre-crash economy whose incentives and
rewards resembled a freewheeling casino rather than a rational
marketplace. . . .
The U.S. has been here before. The middle of the 1830s was
one of those times, when land speculation and easy credit
blurred the lines between legitimate and illegitimate pursuits
of wealth. No part of the U.S. was more steeped in this culture of
speculation than the Deep South, because the forced removal of
Native Americans had opened vast swaths of valuable cotton land
there for development. Cotton cultivated by slaves was the raw
material driving the early Industrial Revolution. The crop’s
market prices kept rising seemingly regardless of supply, and it
became America’s most significant export and arguably the most
important commodity in the world.

SS: The book is called TheInvisibles, which likely borrows from one of the short stories with the same name. Define an “Invisible” for us.
HS: It’s a weird condition because it’s kind of a paranoid
condition. It’s a person who is unmemorable for some reason, who doesn’t
get detected by other people. Other people don’t pick up on their
presence. They are there, but nobody notices them. When they’re gone,
it’s as if they’ve never been there. They’re there lurking.

Over on Lambda Literary, the other recent Flannery O'Connor Award winner, E. J. Levy, answers questions about her collection, LOVE, IN THEORY, "her long road to publishing, the eroticism of academia, and of course, love."

Finally, for the sake of cheesiness, what’s your own theory of love?
I’m from the dairyland of the Midwest so I’m a huge fan of cheese! I
think (I hope) I’m done with theories of love; these days, I’m for love,
in fact. I think Thomas Merton said it well, “We are what we love.” So,
if I have any theory on the subject now, it would be to choose well
what you love and then love with all you’ve got; in the end, it defines
us, as much as we try to define it.